What or where can we do better? Some personal reflections on (the tenth anniversary of) Linguistic Typology

Abstract 1. Preamble On a personal level, the appearance in 1997 of Linguistic Typology (or LT henceforth), as the official journal of the Association for Linguistic Typology (or ALT henceforth), could not have been more timely. I thought that it augured well for the book that I had just started to write (i.e., Song 2001).When I completed my PhD (in linguistic typology) in the early 1990s, a well-known linguist (whose name I am not at liberty to reveal) confided to me that all that needed to be discovered in linguistic typology had been discovered, and that not many would hang around to do (any more) linguistic typology. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I had for some time harboured the uneasy feeling that perhaps I might have committed myself to something that would soon go out of fashion, if not existence – which is understandable given the unidentified linguist's reputation and my status as a fresh PhD graduate. However, the establishment in 1994 of the ALT, together with the advent of LT, gave me all the encouragement that I needed to proceed with the writing of the book. As a matter of fact, if the quality and the quantity of the articles published in LT over the years are anything to go by (not to mention major publications such as The World Atlas of Language Structures (or WALS), the EUROTYP series, Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook, and the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology), the linguist who expressed his pessimism about the future of linguistic typology couldn't have got it more wrong.